Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

Oh, God, not her. Why was it her mother appeared when her hands started shaking? The men her mother liked were always rich. Like the Captain here. And Sidney. They’re the real hustlers. The women who marry for the money. She shouldn’t think that about her mother. She shouldn’t think about her mother at all.

It was coming. The wave was coming. The pills weren’t going to stop it.

The Captain wasn’t Sidney though. He was something different. Really strange, like he knew something he wasn’t telling.

When she danced with him last night, she remembered, it was like at first he was just an ordinary person but then it got more and more like he was somebody else. He got real light, like he didn’t weigh anything at all.

He knew something. She wished she could remember what he said. He talked about some Indians and he said something about good and evil.

Why should he talk like that?

There was something else. It had something to do with her grandfather’s house.

She tried to remember.

Her grandfather always talked about good and evil. He was a preacher.

Something to do with the Captain. The way he looked at that dead dog and didn’t say anything. No, he did say something! He said they were all going where the dog was going!

On her grandfather’s wall, she remembered now, there’d been a great big picture in his living room where a man was standing in a boat going across a river to an island. At the bottom it said something in German. Her grandfather said it meant Island of the Dead. Then her grandfather was dead and she always thought of him as going to that island. Where Lucky was. Lucky met him when he got there.

He was always talking about good and evil and how she would go to hell for her sins if she wasn’t good. The boatman was taking people across the river to hell to the island because they had sinned.

Lucky, her black and white dog. He looked just like that dog today, floating with his two feet up in the air.

Why did she remember it now? That picture burned up in a fire when her grandfather’s house burned down. That’s why God burned her grandfather’s house down. To send him to hell. It was all mixed up.

Nothing makes any sense, Lila thought. Nothing ever did but now it was worse.

Who was he? she wondered. Everything seemed so dreamy. Like she didn’t really belong here. There was something wrong with her, she knew there was. But nobody would tell her what it was.

She listened to the wind. It was getting louder. The boat was tipping more and more on its side. Why was this river so empty? Why was this river so lonely? Weren’t they supposed to be getting near New York? Where were the other boats?

Why was the wind getting louder?

The people along the bank of the river. They never made a sound when the boat went by. It was as if they couldn’t even see the boat.

A sudden gust of wind hit and the boat rocked way over to one side and Lila hung on and looked up through the hatchway and could see the Captain. He couldn’t see she was watching him and his face was sad and serious as though he was at a funeral. As though he was carrying a coffin. Something was wrong.

Something terrible was coming. Something was going to happen. It couldn’t go on like this. She could just feel it in her bones. It was coming. Seeing that dog like that in the water.

It looked like Lucky. Why should he come back now?

She knew! They were coming to that place in the mountains! What did the Captain say it was? End of the World. What did he mean by that!?

What did he MEAN!

Lila sat back on her berth. She pulled the blanket up around her face and listened. All she could hear was the howl of the wind and the sound of the water against the side of the boat.

Suddenly came a huge RRRRROAR!!!…

She screamed!

Phædrus throttled the engine back to a fast rumbling idle. Then he headed the boat up into the howling wind which caught the sail and cracked it like a whip. He dashed forward and freed the halyard. He pulled the sail down as fast as he could, furled it with a single stop and got back to the tiller again before the boat lost its heading.

Crazy wind. Damn gale through here. They didn’t tell him about this in Castleton. Whew!

The water was full of whitecaps and spray. He should have seen that before he reached it. He wasn’t paying attention.

He uncleated the topping lift and lowered the boom into its gallows notch, then sat down again.

With the sail down and the engine guiding the boat everything now seemed under control. Storm King Mountain loomed over him to the right and Breakneck Ridge to the left. Up ahead was West Point and the dog-leg in the river called World’s End. Apparently this wind was some sort of funnel-effect from the mountains.

After a while he saw that the wind wasn’t getting any worse. It just seemed to hold at a mild gale force.

He’d bought this boat with the illusion that when you sailed you just sat and admired the scenery. It seemed like he hadn’t sat still for five minutes in all these days without something needing attention.

Now he saw that he’d furled the sail too sloppily and it was blowing loose. He tied the tiller, went forward again, and this time got all the sail tucked in properly and the stops carefully knotted.

He wondered why Lila was still below somewhere and hadn’t reacted to all this. He supposed he could have gotten her up here to take the tiller while he fixed the sail but something told him it would be easier just to tie it off himself. She wasn’t the aye-aye-sir sort of crewman you needed for jobs like this.

Up ahead were waves caused by the change in the direction of the river. The water looked angry at having been forced to change its path. As he approached he saw it boil up from below and whirl around in strange eddy currents. He headed the boat away from them.

Everything he said turned out wrong with her. No point in aggravating the situation any further. She lived in another world. She really did. And you could never break into this world by superimposing on it patterns of your own.

What he’d told her about that head-boat was valuable if she’d been listening. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t a listener. She had a set of fixed static patterns of value and if you argued with her she’d get mad at you and maybe spite you in some way and that’s about all. He’d seen enough of that. He’d been bucking that stuff all his life.

At the south entrance to the military academy the wind died away to a mild breeze. The boat passed under the high castle-like walls and he thought of calling Lila up to look at it but decided he’d better not. She wouldn’t be interested.

After a while the academy was out of sight and the wind started to pick up again into a sailing breeze. He decided not to put up the sail. The day was running on. He felt tired now. The engine could do it from here.

He sure didn’t feel like going anywhere tonight. All he wanted to do was sleep.

Does Lila have Quality? There it was again, Rigel’s infuriating question. It would come back again and again like that until he had an answer for it. That was the way his mind worked. Why did he ever answer yes ? She seemed determined to prove Rigel was right. He shouldn’t have given any answer at all.

Does a dog have a Buddha-nature? It’s the same question. It’s exactly the same question.

You could transpose it right into that whole Zen verse by Mumon:

Does Lila have Quality?

That’s the most important question of all.

But if you answer "yes" or you answer "no", You lose your own Quality.

That’s a perfect transposition. That’s exactly what happened. He answered yes. That was his mistake. He let himself get caught in the kind of picking-and-choosing situation that Zen avoids, and now he was stuck… It wasn’t that the question wasn’t answerable. It was answerable but the answer went on and on and you never got done… It isn’t Lila that has quality; it’s Quality that has Lila. Nothing can have Quality. To have something is to possess it, and to possess something is to dominate it. Nothing dominates Quality. If there’s domination and possession involved, it’s Quality that dominates and possesses Lila. She’s created by it. She’s a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn’t any more to her than that. The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years of the history of the entire world. She’s a kind of jungle of evolutionary patterns of value. She doesn’t know how they all got there any more than any jungle knows how it came to be.